timbo29 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 02, 2018 11:01 pm
Hi all,
I am gathering documents for a forthcoming FBR application.
Please can you advise how you obtained copies of your Irish parents/grandparents' birth/death certificates?
I have tried to find this online but to no avail, what is the most common method?
I am trying to trace my Irish grandmother armed just with her first name, surname and a partial DOB. Will I have any chance of finding a birth certificate based on this??
Any help appreciated.
I don't know what you have already tried. But here is what has been useful to me.
You can order birth, marriage, and death certificates from the government here:
https://www.hse.ie/eng/births-deaths-an ... es-online/
There are other websites that can be used, but the one above will save you money. It costs €20 for a certificate. I found another that charges €40. Maybe the other sites are helpful if you need help supplying all the information. But I have no experience with them.
I only needed my grandfather's birth certificate from Ireland, as he was married and died in the U.S. To order that online, I had to provide my grandfather's name and DOB, my great-grandfather's full name, my great-grandmother's birth name, and where my grandfather was born. I have relatives who could confirm my great-grandparent's names. I took a guess at birth location by using the Irish census records for 1901 (he was four years old then).
http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/search/ I figured that people didn't move much back then, and was right about that.
Partial DOB could be OK if other information is correct. I say that because I used the Mormon church's free genealogy site to access some U.S. Social Security records.
https://www.familysearch.org/ . And while those records did have a birth date for him, it was wrong. He was actually born two months later. But I did get his certificate, which is how I discovered the DOB I provided was incorrect. I have read that those processing our applications expect there may be some discrepancies. I don't think people were as particular about dates back then. My cousin later told me that our grandfather wasn't really sure of his DOB himself.
I later discovered the the Irish government's genealogy site:
https://www.irishgenealogy.ie
Here, I found his birth record, including a scanned image of the actual civil record. Had I found it earlier, I could have provided the correct DOB, and would have been sure about the town of his birth. But it didn't matter. The DOB was apparently close enough. I suspect that if you are a few months off, that may be OK. A few years... maybe not. It probably depends on whether the other information matches something in the records.
I would recommend that if you use the Irish government genealogy site and if a scanned image is available for the record, be sure to look at it. I also searched the birth records of some of my grandfather's siblings. The search results didn't always show my great-grandmother's name. But the scanned image did.
Since I didn't need them from Ireland, I am unsure what information you need to provide to request their marriage and death certificates, though dates and locations would be likely.
I hope you find what you need. Oddly, I have a second cousin who is interested in doing FBR too. OUr grandfathers were brothers (hers was younger). But I can't find a record of his birth. My grandfather did have twelve siblings. Maybe my great-grandparents figured that not registering a couple wouldn't be noticed....
